A Falling Star
by ThePaperBagPrincess
Summary: And she fell, like a star through the sky, just a little girl tumbling through the cracks in the world. For Amy and Amy.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: For Amy, on her birthday, and for the other Amy, one of Tom Riddle's first victims. **

**I do not own any of the characters.**

* * *

Once upon a time, there was a little girl.

She wasn't always a happy little girl.

She could be angry.

She was tough.

She was a fighter.

She was abandoned.

Unwanted.

But she coped.

She survived.

She was a fighter.

Once upon a time, she was me.

Sometimes I think 'why me?' But see, I know what the answer is really – 'why not?' There's no reason for things, not really. It's not part of anyone's grand plan. It's just life, and it happens to you. That's all. I was just a little piece of grubby London refuse tumbling through it as best I could; nothing special, no hero, definitely no princess. One of the leftovers; the children nobody wanted. But I survived and it could have been worse. Until that day. _That _day.

Once upon a time, there was a boy.

Just one of us. And there were plenty of us who weren't quite right. Who'd seen bad things, done bad things, never been loved, never been wanted. He wasn't nothing unusual.

Except he was.

It was little things. We knew though; we all knew to avoid him, even if he never really _did_ anything. It was the things he _didn't_ do, not the things he did.

Until that day.

The day by the sea. It rained. It always rained. I didn't like the countryside – the grass made me sneeze and I missed the crowds and the noise and the comforting buildings. I wanted to go home.

The day of the cave. It was dark. It was wet. I didn't want to go. It started as an adventure, but it didn't end as one.

The day that a crack opened up in the world and a small, grubby piece of London refuse went tumbling through and nobody noticed except an overworked orphanage matron with a gin habit, who would have liked to catch her but didn't know how.

He's gone now, he's been gone for years and years. But somewhere, that un-special, ordinary little girl is still falling, like a star that falls through the night sky and burns itself into darkness.

She will be falling forever.


	2. Chapter 2

_**I wasn't going to continue this, but somehow it wrote itself. I hope it's reasonably accurate, but I don't know much about 1930s orphanages, so it might not be. If you read, please review - it means a lot to me. **_

_**I do not own either Amy or Tom. **_

* * *

My Ma was just a poor girl from the East End, married at nineteen, dead by twenty five, worn out beyond her years. I remember her, just about. She used to sing me to sleep; she had a sweet voice, though her hands were rough as she smoothed my hair, and she tugged when she brushed it. I can sometimes see her face, usually in dreams. She's mostly crying.

There are people who say that back in those days, it was so common for poor families to lose a child that they were used to it. Well, let me tell those people, you don't _ever_ get used to losing your babies. I saw my Ma after my brother Wilf died, and I saw her after baby Liza went, and I saw her after she gave birth to the dead one, the one that was too little for a name, though she called it Jeanie (That was her own Ma's name – I never knew my Granny, but she came from Scotland, Ma told me that much. I always wanted to visit Scotland). I saw her hurting then; hurting so badly she almost couldn't bear it.

I was the only one she had left in the end. Little Amy, never anything special. I wasn't some pretty little thing with golden curls like Mary up the street; my hair was a kind of plain colour mid way between fair and brown, with not a curl to it. I wasn't very clever and I wasn't very quick at the washing or the cooking, but she still sang to me and smoothed my hair, because I was all she had left. When she went herself, I had nothing, except my Da and he was no use. He wasn't around for long anyway – he disappeared one night, and then there was just me.

* * *

They took me to the orphanage and I watched as they wrote my name in a book – Amy Benson. I'd never learnt my letters, so it was just marks on a page to me. They poked and prodded me, and took my frock off to check for rashes, and pulled my hair looking for nits, then they gave me a new frock like all the others wore, told me to stop sucking my thumb and took me to the room I would share with another little girl, and left me there.

It wasn't a bad place, as orphanages go. There wasn't much love, and I cried into my pillow at night sometimes, when I remembered Ma singing me to sleep, but they fed us and they clothed us, and they didn't use the strap more often than they needed to. And us kids, we were a family. We stuck with each other. The older ones took care of the little ones, you saved your food for anyone who'd been sent to bed without supper, and you never _ever_ told on anyone. We were a gang. We were there for each other.

Except for one.

His name was Tom, and he was a couple of years older than me. He had his own room, and he was the only one who did, but it wasn't because they liked him best. It was because nobody would share with him. That was how he liked it though – he didn't want to be one of us, for all he'd been in the orphanage his whole life, so he had no right to think he was better than any of us. Nobody really knew anything about him. The older ones told stories. They said he'd been born right there in the orphanage; that his mum had had him and then died – some were cruel and said she'd died the moment she saw Tom, out of shame for what she'd produced. They didn't say it in front of Tom though, and I didn't see how it could be true anyway. He might be strange, but he was nice-looking, Tom was. Other people said other things. One of the older kids claimed to have seen Tom's mum coming in, and said she'd been a queer, ugly creature, who didn't look quite human, and that she reckoned Tom was a changeling baby, because he didn't look nothing like her.

Sally Morland said that was a load of rubbish though, because there were no such things as changelings, and it was no longer Tom's mum'd looked queer – she'd been dying. Sally was one of the big girls, and always practical.

But still, Tom was strange and we all knew it. Strange and not very nice, but at the same time, there was something fascinating about him. He could be lovely when he wanted to be, and he had a smile that made you feel like you were something, like you mattered. He was the kind of person you wanted to impress without really knowing why, and he looked at you like he knew all your secrets.

Of course, he never took much notice of me, not at first anyway. I was just another little girl, no different from any other little girl, with my mousy hair and my scatter of freckles and my constant sniffle and my eyes that tended to squint because I really needed spectacles. I only saw him from afar, and I was always a little bit scared of him, but I never talked to him. Not until that day, nearly three years after I'd come to the orphanage, when everything changed. No, I know what you're thinking, and you're wrong. This wasn't _that_ day. That day came later.

This was the day that Tom Riddle ran away.

How he did it, we'd never know. All we knew was that we saw him in the morning, standing watching while we played cricket with three sticks, a tennis ball, and a bashed up old bat (I liked cricket, but I never got a turn with the bat – I was hopeless with either bat or ball, because I couldn't see properly, so they put me on outfield and I stood there hopefully, waiting for the ball to come my way, but it never did), and then by lunch time, he'd gone. Mrs Cole, the matron, noticed the gap on the bench right away – there wasn't much Mrs Cole didn't notice, despite her gin habit – and asked us where he was, but none of us knew, and none of would have told even if we had. Tom might hold himself apart, but he was still one of us. The tables buzzed with it though. Because it wasn't that Tom never broke rules – he did, all the time – but he never, ever, got caught. And we all knew what the punishment was for running away: eight of the best, delivered in front of the whole school.

I won't pretend there weren't quite a number of us who were quite pleased at the thought of Tom Riddle getting thrashed in front of the school. He was too full of himself; he thought he was above the rest of us, and he could be nasty. The older boys didn't like him at all – he was younger than them, but he got the better of them too often. Yes, there were more than a few who were pleased to think of Tom getting what was coming to him. None of us doubted they would find him; he was just a little boy, they'd catch up with him.

But still, they looked all afternoon, and there was no sign of him. Mr Turner, who taught Scripture and Arithmetic and would be responsible for administering the beating, was out searching, and two of the boys swore they'd seen a couple of coppers going into Mrs Cole's office. "They'll put him in gaol!" Billy Stubbs said with excited glee, "If the coppers catch him, they'll put him in gaol for sure, you'll see!"

Eventually, though, he wasn't sent to gaol, and nobody brought him back. At dinner time, he strolled in himself, looking smug and sure of himself. I didn't like Tom Riddle, but I couldn't help admiring him then, because I couldn't have looked so brave, knowing what I was facing. He just walked right in, between the tables, and began to sit himself down in his usual place when Mrs Cole stopped him, sounding more angry than I'd ever heard her.

"Tom Marvolo Riddle!"

He stopped and looked up at her, while the rest of us stared wide-eyed and whispered to each other. I was struck by his middle name – I'd never heard that name before; it sounded fancy, much fancier than orphans usually had. Maybe it was foreign...

"Come here at once!" she ordered him. He hesitated for a moment, as if thinking of refusing, but then he shrugged, turned away from the table and walked slowly up to Mrs Cole's own table.

"And where d'you think you've been?" she demanded as he approached, her voice ominous. Mr Turner was sitting beside her, glowering at Tom, who ignored him. He just looked straight at Mrs Cole, all calm and grown up.

"I went for a walk? Is that a problem?"

Gasps went round the room. Mrs Cole and Mr Turner just stared at him, their mouths open. I don't think they'd ever been spoken to like that by an orphan before.

"Yes, it most certainly is!" Mr Turner burst out at last, "Do you realise that we have been searching for you all afternoon?"

Tom raised his eyebrows.

"Well, you can't have looked very well then – I wasn't far away, but you didn't find me."

This time, there was silence in the room. Nobody dared to so much as whisper. Mr Turner stood up abruptly, his face very red.

"Bend over!" his voice boomed, "You will learn what happens to runaways, boy!"

Tom just looked at him, his face hardly changing. We waited for it – for something. Either for Tom to do as he was told and take his punishment, or for Mr Turner to grab him and make him take it. Neither of them happened. Instead, Tom spoke up.

"You will not beat me," he said, his voice cold and so much older than it should have been, because he was only nine. Still we waited on tenterhooks, because Mr Turner most certainly _would_ beat him, we all knew that...

For a long, long moment, everything was quiet, so quiet I could hear a bluebottle buzzing over by the window. Then Mr Turner swallowed.

"Go to your room!" his voice thundered, making me jump almost out of my skin, "You shall have no food tonight for this, boy!"

He went. He was smiling as he left the room, more relaxed than any of us. I realised I was gripping the table so hard the splinters were digging into me, and I could see little Daisy Peters beside me had screwed her eyes shut. For a few moments, nobody even moved. Then Sally Morton picked up her fork and took a mouthful of mutton, and the spell was broken.

We were quiet the whole of the rest of the meal though, talking in low voices, and every now and then, people would glance towards the door he'd gone out of. Nobody quite knew what had happened. Why Mr Turner hadn't belted him good and proper. Something strange had happened, that was all we knew, and it was Tom who'd done it again. Nobody was slipping any bread or meat into their pockets for him though, and that puzzled me. It wasn't supposed to matter who you liked and who you didn't – if one of us was in trouble, the others rallied round, and if someone was doing without their food, we made sure they didn't go hungry. Sally was sitting across from me, and I leaned towards her.

"Sally... ain't nobody going to take Tom no tea?"

"Ssh," Sally looked round uneasily, "No..."

"Why not?"

"It's Tom," she told me practically, still talking very quietly though, "Tom don't want friends. He don't want people being nice to him. That's how he is. And there's something funny about him. You saw what happened just there."

I had seen what had happened. I agreed that it was funny. Strange, even. I didn't like Tom Riddle any more than anyone else did. I was scared of him. But still... he'd stood up to Mr Turner, and that had to have taken guts, and now he was getting no tea. And more than that, he'd done something I only dreamed of – he'd been outside. For a few brief hours, he'd been _free_.

Carefully, casually, so nobody'd notice, I wrapped a lump of mutton in a piece of bread, and slipped it into my pocket.

We filed out, all of us, still quieter than usual, across the yard towards the blocks where we slept. We could see Mr Turner glowering, and none of us wanted to be the one he took his temper out on. I didn't know how I was going to deliver my mutton parcel now, because the boys' rooms were in a different part from ours, and I felt a bit foolish for my impulse, until I saw that Tom wasn't in his room, as he'd been told. He was standing in the yard, leaning against the wall between our door and theirs, hands shoved into his pockets as he watched us, that funny sort of smile still on his face, like he knew things we didn't. I had to pass him, and I paused, slipping my squashy parcel out of my pocket and pushing it against his arm. For a moment, he just stood there, and I thought he wasn't going to take it, and I felt even more foolish. Then I felt a hand come out, and suddenly my own was empty.

I didn't look at him. We didn't speak. I looked at the ground as I hurried on my way, to hide the smile on my face. I didn't like Tom Riddle much, but he was brave, and he wouldn't go hungry tonight at least.


End file.
